Mostly about confectionary

Off bus, friendly taxi driver, bag on shoulder, sleepy shuffle through hostel door, few deep breaths, sign in and...

The Peruvian President, our hosts clucked, was in town, laying the first block of a new museum outside the Temple of the Sun. So, before you could say, "An attempted rape scene? At five in the morning? I mean, come on, man," we were utterly not sleeping. Instead, we were out in a taxi and scooting off towards the Pre-Inca ruins of the Moche civilization.

Of course, President Garcia was gone - long gone - by the time we got there. But Clara, of Casa de Clara, our hostel, would give us a "special price" for Michael, her moustachioed husband and trained guide, to take us round the temples.

Michael talked lots. Very garrulous, he was. His guiding repertoire included a string of pre-prepared jokes and a dusty collection of fisher-price philosophical digressions. At one point, he described every tiny individual drawing on a huge, crescent phantasmagoric mural. It took about ten minutes. It was painful, painful. Michael did his best to make the fascinating ruins, which were being further excavated even as we wandered round, seem pretty damn dull. Nice guy. Bad guide. We went back to the hostel and rested.

(The Moche, incidentally, were pretty interesting chaps. They worshipped the mountains, like the Incas who would subsume them, were big on priests, and were burdened with a vast array of very weird, very demanding gods, plastered reverentially over the ancient walls - and frequently appeased with big, fat, messy, mass human sacrifices.)

But now, while we're resting there, in Casa de Clara, after visiting the Moche temples of the sun and moon, it's surely a propitious time to discuss the confectionary of South America.

THE TOP FIVE CONFECTIONARY PRODUCTS OF SOUTH AMERICA

5. THE PUSH POP (with Spray)

It turns out that the sweets of my teenage years never actually died; they just moved to South America. Remember push pops? They were crap. Really, really, crap. Basically a stick of phallic, flavourless, hardened candy that you could push up and down within its plastic sheath. Vaguely sexual, really - and not nice at all. But in South America, you see, they come - sometimes; you have to seek them out - with a spray attached. And this spray is a bunch of flavoured chemicals sloshing about a little container. It lasts forever and it tastes of liquified push pop concentrate, strong and sharp and tangy. You can have competitions to see who can do the most sprays in their mouth in a row before they start watering from the eyes or wigging out on the E-numbers. It's fantastic. The push pop is fun to suck on for nostalgia value - but, honestly kids, it's all about the spray. The blue flavour is particularly reccomended.

Available in: Bolivia and Argentina

4. GELOBUGS

A gourmet sweet this one. Little nodules of gelatine filled, in a little squidgy parcel at top, different in colour to the main sweet - and this, internet, is the good bit - with a fluorescent 'fruit juice'. You only get about seven sweets in your tiny yellow bag, and they're quite expensive. But oh boy when you pop that little chap in your mouth and masticate it until the juice seeps out, man, you just know you're heading back in to the shop to buy another two packs and screw it Andy I'll have enough change because the bus fare probably isn't that much anyway.

Available in: Argentina

3. SOUR SKITTLES (Lime green packet)

I have a problem when I return to England, because I can't go back. Never again can I purchase a packet of regular, red skittles. I've tasted the sour ones. And I can't go back. Not ever. It's like owning a dishwasher. Once you've owned a dishwasher, washing dishes in the sink is - well, it's just horrible. You feel cheated. Filled with regret. Folorn. Sour skittles, then, are the dishwasher to the regular skittles sink. Andy and I were on a packet a day through most of Peru - and some of Bolivia. Sour skittles. They look like regular skittles that have been coated in sugar and they are just bursting with sour flavour and there are raspberry ones and strawberry ones and watermelon ones and apple ones and lemon ones. Andy likes watermelon the best; my preference is raspberry. Each flavour, though, has its merits. I live in hope that they have been made available in the UK during my absence, and here in Argentina my roving eye still searches the tiendas for them, though their time, I know, has passed.

Available in: Peru, Bolivia

2. NERDS

Nerds! You must remember nerds. I'd get them from Mr Polly, just outside the school gates, probably most afternoons for over a year, back in the days when all the girls were taller than all the boys and football at lunch time was the only thing that mattered. And then they disappeared. But in South America, you can get FOUR different packets, each with TWO flavours, in SEPARATE compartments, which are IMPOSSIBLE to open without ripping. It's magical. Combinations include watermelon punch and wildberry, and strawberry and grape. But the best ones are the sour ones: atomic apple and lightning lemon. You get lots in your pack; enough to make you feel quite sick if you eat them all in one go, actually - but it's worth it. It's definitely worth it.

NB. Internet research suggests there is a shop in Kent which still imports them. Lucky Kent, I say.

1. THE EGOCENTRICO

We bought for the name. We stayed for the taste. Without a doubt the greatest ice-cream on the continent. Think Feast, but cylindrical, with vanilla ice-cream, and a much bigger chocolate centre. And the great thing was that the chocolate centre varied. Sometimes you'd get a bad one that crumbled as it met the stick, and sometimes you'd get one that was so huge it crowded out the ice-cream and kept going right down to the base. The outside shell was crunchy chocolate with chippings of nut. I would get whingy if I went more than a few days without one. I miss them, internet. I miss them every day. And when I think that I might never go back to Peru and taste one again oh dear god it makes me want to weep.

Available in: Peru

Finally, Bolivia deserves extreme kudos for being - so it seems to me - the only country in the world, other than the UK, that sells Salt and Vinegar crisps (Pringles). For that, and many other reasons, it will always be my favourite. And I don't even care that they cost almost as much as a steak. You go Bolivia. Go Bolivia. Go.

A Bus Journey to Trujillo

There was a bit of a scrap on our night bus to Trujillo. A guy was adamant he had paid and lost his ticket, was refusing to pay again. Watching the scene unfold through the window, shouts muted by a shroud of half-sleep, it was all very entertaining. Then a guy in a red T-shirt went for the ticketless chap with a stick. That seemed a bit unnecessary. A policeman was leaning against his car and just watching it all. This appears to be the move policemen in South America are most fond of.

Earlier, we had been treated to The Girl Next Door in dubbed Spanish - lapsing sporadically into English when the colours on screen liquified. This sounds bad, but was a nice change from the usual South American bus-movie-diet of Steven Seagal flicks; I must have seen Under Siege four times by now - and around five of Seagal's other 'films'.

(So you don't have to watch any of them, what happens is Seagal goes to a place where there are people of different ethnicity to himself, learns their fighting techniques, and defeats the baddies USING THEIR OWN MOVES BETTER THAN THEY CAN! Also, he sports a pony-tail that makes you want to cry and call his mother.)

Another film came on at around half five in the morning, slicing my slumber time down to around four hours, and containing - oh, yes, internet - a pretty graphic attempted rape scene. Sure.

It was called, I think, The Condemned, and was a WWE production starring Stone Cold Steve Austin and many other wrestlers. And Vinnie Jones. Yes, Vinnie was there, dubbed into Spanish, swishing a knife about. Naturally, The Condemned was watched with horrified fascination by the numerous children on board. I spent the next twenty minutes watching some young Peruvian minds disintegrate.

Ah, but outside the window, away from Steve and Vinnie and the traumatised faces of wide-eyed kids, we were travelling through a desert. Green scrubs pocked the barren brown and - with appropriately filmic feel - a lone, ravaged dog trotted past, heading from nowhere to nowhere.

A cop slumped down next to me. You could have bottled his odour and called it Swarthy Musk. Stevedores and builders would wear it and it would have a small cult following of women. The cop became the third person of the very young day to stamp on my bare feet. I let him off because he had a gun and could doubtlessly take me. Instead of protesting, I returned to the window; the desert was beginning to misbehave.

Great black crags ruptured up from the arid floor. On top of one, the dirty white shell of a building sat, ill-advised, rightly-abandoned, justly-alone. This was good. This was as a desert should be.

But then, suddenly, sprouting out from the dusty wastes, were endless fields of long, swaying, green corn. Now, this was just not on. Deserts were not supposed to behave like this. This was my first desert and it should act like one. But it would not. The landscape: lush green corn, dead desert, lush green corn, dead desert, lush green corn, dead desert. On the desert sections, the buildings by the side of the road looked like burnt-out husks from an apocalyptic Western's finale. But, frankly, it wasn't good enough.

I decided, then, that this would not count as my first desert.

A week or so later, Huacachina would behave properly.